Putting Dickens on the Map

 

• Charles Dickens is born in Portsmouth, Hampshire on 7 February 1812.

• Dickens’s family moves to London in 1822 when his father is transferred there.

• Dickens marries Catherine Hogarth, who was born in Edinburgh in 1836. He is awarded the freedom of the city – a great honour – in 1841.

• The whole Dickens family takes the first of many jolly summer holidays in Broadstairs, Kent, in 1837.

• Dickens visits schools in north-east England in 1838. He is outraged by bad conditions – especially at Bowes Hall, County Durham – and features them in his next novel, Nicholas Nickleby.

• Dickens’s trip to Yarmouth, on the windswept Norfolk coast, in 1849, inspires many scenes in his semi-autobiographical novel David Copperfield.

• Coketown, the industrial milltown in Hard Times, published in 1854, is partially based on 19th-century Preston, Lancashire.

• In 1856, Dickens purchases Gad’s Hill Place in Higham, Kent.

• In Manchester, Dickens performs in a play opposite actress Ellen (Nelly) Ternan, and falls in love with her, 1857.

• Dickens and Nelly narrowly escape death in a railway accident at Staplehurst in 1865.